Nottingham social media – how museums have used it to increase visitor numbers

When it comes to getting more people visiting the UK’s most haunted building, social media had the answer.

The National Justice Museum in Nottingham has seen an increase in visitor numbers after embracing Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Faye Rollinson, who has attended several Status Social social media training workshops, is a member of the marketing team which also looks after the City of Caves museum. Watch the video or read below to see Faye explain how social media helps pull in the crowds

Why do you use social media at the National Justice Museum?

Social media is a huge part of my marketing strategy for the National Justice Museum and also our sister attraction, the City of Caves. We tend to use social media to reach out to different target audiences, so we use Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Twitter’s really good for our business side of things. Instagram is a really good visual platform for us, so it allows us to engage with our audience and also upload a lot of the pictures and visual images of our building so that people can engage with our actors as well.

How did you use Facebook and how has it increased visitor numbers?

Recently with Facebook, we’ve seen a really high increase in our likes and followers and people engaging with Facebook, and we tend to upload a lot of the events on there, so we talk about what’s going on in the museum, as well as just some funny pictures, pictures of our actors and pictures of our building.

We also do things like ‘Object of the Month’ to get people engaged. It’s quite important for me to not rant on about what we do all the time, so sometimes I just upload funny pictures and funny captions that aren’t necessarily related to the museum but it lets people see that we have got another side to us and a sense of humour that people can engage with.

How do you know it’s working?

We monitor Facebook and we get evaluation forms from our visitors. We always ask people how they heard about us. We have seen quite a big increase in social media, especially Facebook.

Also at night time we do get quite a few people messaging us asking for tickets. Especially over the weekend we tend to get a lot of engagement with people asking for tickets.

A lot of the time with the evaluation forms and in the ‘How did you hear about us?’ section, a lot of the time it’s through Facebook.

How have you used Twitter?

Twitter is really good for us when reaching out to businesses. It’s just so easy and so fast-for us so it’s really important we’re on it all the time, making sure we know where we’re mentioned, why we’re being mentioned and to see what kind of people are engaging with us and also to ensure that we’re reaching our target audience making sure we’re being followed by people who follow us because they’re interested and not just following us in order to get a follow back.

We have business networking events and, again, we do evaluation forms. We ask them how they heard about us and a high percentage of that is through Twitter.

How should Instagram be used?

The reason I chose to use Instagram was because I noticed that it is a place where young people tend to go. So they’re coming away from Facebook to get away from their parents so they can go somewhere a lot more visual.

So we chose Instagram in order to reach out to the younger target audience because that’s one of the main audiences that comes to the National Justice Museum, mainly through school visits. But we want to interact with them and get them to come along at the weekend and try and engage with them that way.

So we’ve gone to Instagram to reach out to that audience and get them to engage with images and tell the story of what we do through Instagram.

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